A real-time COFDM transmission system based on the GNU Radio - USRP N210 platform

Abstract

The term Software Defined Radio (SDR) has become familiar in research and development of wireless communication systems today. SDR allows users to adjust a system with its flexibility and re-configurability for any frequency band and different modulation of various physical parameters by using programmable hardware and software. In this paper, we implement an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system combined with channel coding blocks based on Software-Defined Radio. The software design and implementation are proposed for a GNU Radio-based OFDM system in real-time wireless transmission. Different scenarios with and without channel coding have been implemented in order to evaluate the Packet Failure Rate (PFR) performance. Quadrature amplitude modulation QAM-16, convolutional encoder combined with block interleaver and Viterbi decoder are deployed for the implementation. It is shown that the introduction of channel coding blocks into GNU Radio-based OFDM system reduced the PFR of data signals transmitted over Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) boards. Copyright 2014 ACM.